The Le Pen family: family feud ends in political patricide

When Jean-Marie’s daughter succeeded him as president of the Front National, she set out to widen the appeal of the far-rightwing party, much to her father’s disgust: his latest outburst could well end in his ejection

Marine Le Pen with father Jean-Marie during the Front National's congress in Lyon last November Photograph: Robert Pratta/Reuters

Politics is renowned for being a dog-eat-dog world. But for the Le Pen family, France’s far-right political dynasty, it was more a case of dog eats cat.

Last September, tensions between Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 86-year-old founder of the France’s Front National, and his daughter, Marine, the party president, were running at an all-time high when one of Le Pen’s doberman dogs savagely attacked and killed Marine’s beloved Bengal cat. Marine, who for years had been living with her father in the stable wing of a 17th-century chateau in the western suburbs of Paris, moved out a month later.

For a long time leading up to that point, disagreement had been brewing over the party’s future. Le Pen junior, who succeeded her father as the FN president four years ago with 67.7% of the vote, wanted to modernise its image and outlook, ditching its thuggish past in favour of mainstream credibility and increased electoral popularity. Le Pen senior was aghast at the course his youngest child was steering, condemning her publicly for being too “left wing” and progressive.

While Marine, 46, actively courts the gay vote, her father once described homosexuality as a “biological and social anomaly”. While Marine has attempted to purge the party of its thuggish diehards – banning skinheads in Nazi uniform from attending rallies and promoting smooth-suited technocrats to key management positions – her father has been fined thousands of euros for inciting racial hatred.

Jean-Marie Le Pen and Marine Le Pen in August 2010, six months before she became president of the Front National.

Photograph: Pascal Rossignol/REUTERS

And while Marine publicly condemned the Holocaust in 2011, her father still dismisses it as “a minor detail”. Last June, he suggested making an “oven-load” of the Jewish singer Patrick Bruel, prompting his daughter to issue a statement insisting that the FN was not antisemitic.

Despite the paternal loose cannon, Marine’s approach has been paying off in the form of electoral success. The FN is no longer regarded as the home of crazed, fascist eccentrics whose dangerous philosophy exists on the extreme margins of the political arena. She has been keen to steer away from anti-immigrant rhetoric to highlight flagship policies of economic protectionism, opposition to the EU and a zero-tolerance approach to law and order. As a result, the party’s popularity has been growing – it won several seats at the 2014 municipal elections and took 25% of the votes in last year’s European elections. A recent poll found that 30% of 18- to 24-year-old Frenchmen would “certainly” vote for the FN, though the party was disappointed that it failed to win a single council in the recent departmental elections. It has, according to Jean-Yves Camus, a research fellow at the Iris thinktank in Paris, become “less of a social stigma to be in the Front National”.

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In France, the success of this “de-demonisation” has meant that, in spite of the occasional public skirmish, Le Pen junior and senior were managing to maintain a febrile peace for the sake of a broader goal. But when the dog killed the cat, it seemed both to symbolise the generational difference in approach and to presage a deeper split.

Last week, that split came with an incendiary radio interview in which Jean-Marie reiterated his claim that the Nazi gas chambers were a historical “detail”, praised France’s collaborationist wartime leader, Marshal Petain, and questioned the country’s Spanish-born prime minister, Manuel Valls.

“What is his real loyalty to France?” Le Pen asked. “Has this immigrant been converted?”

The comments prompted an extraordinary rupture with his daughter and heir. In a statement, she not only distanced herself from her father, but also announced that she planned to block him from running in the forthcoming regional elections and was calling a meeting of the party’s executive bureau to discuss his future. There is now a distinct possibility he will be expelled from the FN altogether.

“Jean-Marie Le Pen seems to have descended into a strategy somewhere between scorched earth and political suicide,” Marine said in a statement.

After years of trying to handle her father’s off-message barracking, it seemed Marine had snapped. The dog was still barking, but this time, the cat was clawing back.

As with most dynasties, the Le Pen family has a long history of merging the personal and the political with unpredictable results. The patriarch, Jean-Marie, was born the son of a Breton fisherman and orphaned as an adolescent when his father’s boat was blown up by a mine in 1942. He joined the French Foreign Legion before entering politics and founding the FN in 1972. He ran for the presidency five times, most notably in 2002, when he obtained 16.86% of votes in the first round, prompting a bout of national soul-searching.

He has been married twice. His first wife, Pierrette Lalanne, gave him three daughters: Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine. When they divorced, Lalanne took her revenge by posing for Playboy. The daughters stuck by their father.

As the eldest, Marie-Caroline was expected to succeed Le Pen in the political arena, but she split from him to found a new political party with her husband. After a brief teenage rebellion, during which she ran away from home to work at a Club Med, the middle daughter, Yann, was more willing to toe the line. Yann married Samuel Maréchal, the director of the FN’s youth wing, in 1993 and had three daughters, one of whom, Marion, is an FN deputy, who was elected in 2012 at 22, making her the youngest politician ever to sit in the National Assembly.

Marion, a telegenic blonde who once caused the clientele at a Paris restaurant to burst into a round of applause when she walked in through the door, is closer to her grandfather than her aunt. Growing up, she was surrounded by her grandfather’s ideology. Her childhood hero was Joan of Arc because, as Marion once explained, she fought “to save the country from Anglo-Saxon occupiers”.

Marion espouses some fairly unpalatable views under a sheen of plausibility. When I interviewed her shortly after her election, she talked enthusiastically of a FN policy that would strip second-generation immigrants of French citizenship should they commit a crime. In January, she disobeyed her aunt’s orders and posted a video on Twitter that compared Islam to Nazism. The video was then retweeted by Jean-Marie.

It cannot have made for a comfortable atmosphere chez Le Pen. Until recently, the extended family lived together in an elegant redbrick manor house called the Pavillon de l’Ecuyer in Saint-Cloud, a 5000 sq m property once inhabited by Madame de Pompadour and left to Le Pen by the heir to a chemicals fortune in 1977.

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Marion shared the second floor with her mother. When she got married last year to Matthieu Decosse, a 30-year-old events manager, she simply moved her husband into the apartment. The couple had a baby girl, Olympe, in September and Le Pen is said to allow the baby to play on his desk.

The closeness of this arrangement has led some to dub Le Pen’s niece Marionette – a mere puppet of her grandfather. “We’re lucky to have such a close family, with my grandfather and cousins around us,” Marion said when I met her. “We’re very blessed. I think because we’ve always been confronted by adversity from the outside, so we’ve become closer, because we’ve had to be a strong unit to withstand those blows.”

But increasingly, those blows have not been external. Rather, the implosion has been triggered from within. Le Pen, who was boycotted by much of the mainstream media, is said to be jealous of his daughter’s frequent television appearances. He is mistrustful, too, of her attempts to modernise and, in particular, of the efforts by her deputy, Florian Philippot, to bring more professionalism to the party.

It is hard to imagine anyone designed to antagonise Jean-Marie Le Pen more. He is said to deplore the influence Philippot has over his youngest daughter and to refer to him dismissively as “l’énarque” – a term for a graduate of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, the elite institution for wannabe civil servants. But after years in his shadow, Marine Le Pen is gearing up for her own moment in the spotlight and gathering a new entourage around her. She has ambitions to stand for the presidency in 2017. Her father, whom she once called “the man of my life”, would be foolish to stand in her way.

THE LE PEN FILE

Born Jean-Marie: 20 June 1928, the son of a Breton fisherman, orphaned in adolescence; Marine: 5 August 1968, youngest daughter of three from Jean-Marie’s first marriage

Best of times In January, Marine came top in a poll of potential presidential candidates to replace François Hollande in 2017, garnering 29-30% of the votes.

Worst of times Last week, father and daughter suffered a very public split after Jean-Marie gave an explosive radio interview in which he reiterated his claim that the Nazi gas chambers were a historical ‘detail’, praised France’s collaborationist wartime leader, Marshal Philippe Petain, and questioned the patriotism of the country’s Spanish-born prime minister, Manuel Valls.

She says “Tolerance? What does that mean? I am a very tolerant and hospitable person, like you. Would you accept 12 illegal immigrants moving into your flat? You would not!” Marine Le Pen, interviewed in May 2012.